Yes, it's just crazy that a new rocket engine actually would be tested before being used for launching people into space. Whatever were they thinking? We've had solid fuel rockets since ancient China, surely we don't need testing any new rockets built since then. Just build them, attach them to the spacecraft and off you go in a most spectacular way.

For each of those requirements you scrap, you save a boatload of money. If you equip your capsules (no need for big wings like the shuttle) with one use heatshields, you might incur a weight penalty, but you can use 40 year old Apollo or Soyuz technology. If you can squeeze an extra half a percent of efficiency from your engines or start with more boost then you think you'd need, you can chuck the light weight requirement.

Commercial space flight will be different from government in a few important ways. I suspect that being able to design your craft without congressional 'input' will help. A lot of the things that make the shuttle complicated and expensive to run are leftover from 1970s requirements that it serve everyone, from civilian NASA to the NRO (spy sats) to the Air Force (dropping bombs on USSR using once around orbits and landing back at Vandenburg).

Commercial space flight will be different from government in a few important ways.

Yes. High on the list is economics... And tossing your heatshield after each flight is not economical at all.

I suspect that being able to design your craft without congressional 'input' will help.

When we have a spacecraft designed with Congressional input, we'll have a data point to compare to. As it is, all Congress contributed was a budget cap... Which pretty much everyone has to live with inside and outside the Beltway.

A lot of the things that make the shuttle complicated and expensive to run are leftover from 1970s requirements that it serve everyone,

Umm... No. It's complicated and expensive because Congress declined to produced Saturn's for cargo delivery and then declined to fund a space station in paralell with the Shuttle. This forced the Shuttle to become a cargo craft (as opposed to the passenger craft it originally was) and then forced it to have a far higher degree of self-sufficiency to support free-flight missions. It's also complicated and expensive because in many ways it's a first generation system. It's also complicated because it operates in a series of harsh enviroments. It's also expensive because NASA kept trading R&D costs for operational costs - rather than admitting the thing could not be done and that a massive redesign and delay was in order.

The Shuttle was never *required* to 'serve everyone', that was a NASA creation in order to build political support for the craft. The only real impact of that was the wing (for high cross-range) and to some extent the tiles. (A tile system was already baselined long before the design was mutated from a short duration passenger taxi into the ungainly thing it became.)

Yes. High on the list is economics... And tossing your heatshield after each flight is not economical at all.That depends upon what your heatshield is made of. If it's made from the same tiles that make up the space shuttle, it would be expensive. If it's made from carbon phenolic, or a similar material, it would most likely cost less to replace it every time than to boost a more durable material into orbit. That's not to mention the fact that a tile system or similar would still have to be inspectedand partially replaced after every flight, reducing any gains in cost.

Remember that for every pound you put in orbit, you just spent thousands of dollars. Those thousands of dollars could provide for a lot of work making a heat shield on the ground.

It's interesting to note that the Chinese made cheap, disposable wooden heatshields [hobbyspace.com]. It's certainly not the most glamorous thing around, but it gets the job done.

From the link:

The Chinese had developed another novel but usable "low tech" solution. They glued up wooden blocks, appropriately contoured, with the end grain facing the reentry air stream. The wooden heat shield would char and ablate during reentry, just like the caulk material on the Apollo capsules. The fact that you could build a serviceable heat shield for reentry from space out of wood certainly showed that the basic problem was not insurmountably difficult, so Tom had always regarded this too as a rather straight-forward challenge.... Wood can't withstand directly the temperatures of reentry, but for that relatively short time, it can resist those temperatures by gradually eroding.... As the wood heated, a carbon ceramic char formed on the outer surface, and the volatiles, or fluids, in the wood behind the char flowed up through cracks in the char. Heat was radiated away from the charred surface, and the interior was kept cool by the outward movement of the cooler heat-absorbing volatiles flowing towards the hot side.

And tossing your heatshield after each flight is not economical at all.

I have to disagree... I have proprietary
pricing info from ablative heatshield vendors
about historical projects and ranges for new
ones which indicates that ablative TPS
systems should be dirt-cheap. First unit
prices under a megabuck cheap.

wait.. isn't "cheap" one of your requirments? Are you saying that if you scrap that one you can build it for less?:)

No, he's saying that "reusable" is one of the
requirements, and if you scrap that one then
you can build it for less. And lighter, too.

The Space Shuttle tiles aren't lighter
than a good ablative heatshield would be.
The shuttles have about 18.5 metric tons of tiles
and thermal blankets and leading edge RCC
panels, out of a total gross weight of 104
metric tons (18%).

The space shuttle has a higher surface area compared to it's mass than an Apollo capsule too. Your rough calculations don't seem to take that into account.

That's because they don't have to. To a first order
approximation, thermal protection total heat capacity
for orbital re-entry is proportional to the vehicle
mass only, not the vehicle's surface area.
Denser vehicles with less surface area need
more thickness of heat shield per unit area.
It all comes out very nearly equal, with some
slight advantag

SpaceEx was founded by Elon Musk from the proceeds of the 2002 sale of his prior start-up, Paypal, to Ebay.

Now here's one person who hasn't left the proceeds of his sale into his PayPal account. I mean, imagine that, buying rocket and space stuff like that, they'd have frozen his account immediately, for no reason, without any explanation besides "what goes on looks strange".

Well done Elon! (and when you have time, please tell your former employees to f*)(*&@$ing give me back my $150 in my account they locked up about, oh, 5 years ago...)

In March, once the final checkouts are completed -- akin, said Musk, to software beta testing -- Falcon I will lift a Department of Defense satellite called TacSat-1 into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Do commercial entities normally do DoD satellite launches? That doesn't seem right to me.

You mean companies that operate for profit like Boeing or Lockheed? The real difference is this company doesn't have a reliability record yet. I'm sure they satellite didn't cost much and isn't terribly important, but it's good to see a young company getting it's foot in the door.

It seems to me the original idea of NASA is actualy going to work!
NASA was created in the begining to combine all of the branches of the government's space research in one location, to pionere new technologies, then, after a few decades, transfer the exploration of space over to the privite sector. Needless to say, NASA is stil in existance.
What is impresive about this is the fact that someone from a company is doing a project like this. The problem with the idea of space being exploited by companies is

It just occured to me that the guys doing these space ships are like the rich guys a few centuries ago mounting ocean expeditions, as much for the exploration and adventure as for profit. We all complain about rich people, but many of them tend to be philanthropists and use their money for some kind of public good.

In the wake of the dot-com days, we have a odd situation where we have a large number of very rich individuals who are also quite clueful and interested in technology. Many of them read lots of sci-fi books when they were kids, and are hoping to make a mark on the future by funding space endeavours.

The linked article mentioned the "rebel billionaire" buying a new fleet of SpaceShipTwos for commercial trips to the upper stratosphere and back, which in my opinion is a prety foolish way for him to waste his accquired wealth. Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole pu

no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down

Let's also note that those two or three had to pay significantly more than "a couple of thousand".

Hell, look at skydiving. Lots of people pay a few hundred dollars in fees and equipment in order to ride a plane and then jump out of it. You think people wouldn't pay a few thousand to ride up to space?

I know if I had a choice of ways I could die, I would always choose space over just about anything else.

Sure as hell beats getting hit by that drunk driver tomorrow night. I don't wanna die in no friggen car after coming home from some meaningless place. And I don't want to die in some jet some religous fuck decides to run into a building. I'm gonna die in space, dammit.

Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down.

Every year, a great many people shell out upwards of $60,000 [alpineascents.com] to be given an attempt to climb Mount Everest. Many of these don't make it all the way, and a large number

"I think it's very important that we become a spacefaring civilization, and that we eventually become multiplanetary."

Although I didn't want to encumber the story's synopsis with it, I really think Musk needs to discuss his vision of space migration with Gregg Maryniak [google.com] who was the head of Space Studies Institute [ssi.org] for sometime after Gerard O'Neill's death.

It was Gerard O'Neill who put forth the vision of space settlement [aol.com] after challenging his Princeton physics class wit

To get into orbit, you need at least 9000 m/s of deltaV, or about 15 g-minutes.

To do that in 160 seconds (2.67 minutes), you need an *average* acceleration of over 5.5g. You're also not going to get that at launch without a ridiculously overpowered engine that will crush your passengers at the end, when the ship has burned out all of its fuel and weighs a lot less. Most rocket engines aren't all that throttleable, with min thrust usually >.5 x max thrust.

First off, these engines are only part of a two-stage process, making your whole point wrong. Using them for two stages gives a total burn time of 320 seconds, yielding an average acceleration to LEO of more on the order of 3g, which is quite reasonable.

Second, even on a single stage rocket, an average acceleration of 5g is almost acceptable; witness certain NASA studies [nasa.gov] (about halfway down the page) which concluded that 5g for two minutes is sustainable for most all humans.

I didn't realize it was a two-stage rocket. I should have R'd TFA more carefully.

While your passengers might be able to handle 5g+ for a couple of minutes, there would still be engineering problems. A single stage to orbit (SSTO) rocket runing LOX/Kerosene needs to be at least 12:1 fuel:(everything else). That means that at burnout, the acceleration will be as much as 13x what it was at launch, because the same engine is now pushing 1/13 as much weight. Most rocket engines are n

5.5g for the Falcon I is fine as it only launches satellites. Have you seen the diagrams for the Falcon V though? It is a much larger rocket and has a much larger first stage that I can only assume holds more propellant.

When they say 160 seconds I wonder if they are talking about Specific Impulse? [af.mil] The definition of specific impulse has never been clear to me, but it has something to do with the amount of thrust you get per amount of fuel burned, and is expressed in seconds. For example, the space shuttle main engines have a specific impulse of about 450 seconds.

I sent for a starter package on the America's Space Prize 2 months ago, and I never recieved a reply of any sort. I don't think it actually exists.

If you're serious, contact them again.

For their own reasons, they did early
announcements before the whole rules
and signup packages were ready.

However, as someone who contacted
them before they even officially
announced it, I can assure you that
they are responding to potential
competitors that they believe are
credible, and they are in the process
now

Right now, launch costs are the biggest barrier to having lots of cool things (orbital hotels, factories, lunar bases, etc.) zipping around in space. According to this interview [hobbyspace.com], Musk was previously planning on self-funding a mission to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided to start SpaceX when he realized that the overall mission cost would be dominated by the launch price.

SpaceX's Falcon I [wikipedia.org] is designed to compete with the Pegasus rocket [astronautix.com], which currently dominates the "low-cost" launch market. The Pegasus costs around $20 million to launch 375kg into space. The Falcon I will cost $6 million to launch 670kg into space. Stated differently, the Pegasus costs around $53,000 per kg, while the Falcon I will cost around $9000 per kg.

Things change even more with SpaceX's larger Falcon V [wikipedia.org] rocket, scheduled for a launch this November. This will compete directly with the Delta IV Medium [astronautix.com], which costs $90 million to lift 8600kg to LEO. The Falcon V will cost $12 million to lift 6020kg to LEO. That's around $10000 per kg for the Delta IV Medium and around $2000 per kg for the Falcon V.

One of SpaceX's goals is to reuse as much in terms of engines, components, and software as they build larger and larger rocket. As they benefit from economies of scale and build larger rockets, the costs will only drop.

Someone is putting his money where my mouth has been. Describing permanent settlement of Mars as "a positive, constructive, inspirational goal" capable of uniting humanity at a critical time," dot-com entrepreneur Elon Musk has pledged a substantial portion of his personal fortune to realizing that goal, beginning with a proposed $20 million technology-demonstration M

Ya know the best way to get all these interesting things into space is to not lift them. Use lunar materials (bwahahaha, as if a Falcon V could get to the moon) or use asteroids (mehehehe, yep, cause going into a solar orbit and sending a few 100,000 tons back earth's way is really doable) or, (really this time I promise) use the vast amount of abandoned space junk that is already sitting up there in earth orbit. We know what it is made from. We know where it is. Why not cut it up and do something usefu

HS: Private rocket development by startup companies in the post-Apollo era includes projects such as Truax's Volksrocket in the late 70s, Conestoga I and AMROC in the 80s, Beal Aerospace and several other ELV and RLV companies in the 1990s. They all came up short of space and many see their history as nothing but a tale of woe and failure. To me, though, they each appear to build on what was learned before them and to provide significant advancements in the technical and strategic knowledge needed to develop a rocket business from scratch.

It looks like SpaceX will be the startup company that finally makes it to orbit. When you studied prior efforts, what were some of the lessons [you] learned on what to do and, perhaps most importantly, what not to do?

Musk: Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts. If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way:)

The ones I'm familiar with failed on one or more of the following:

1. Lacked a critical mass of technical skill.
2. Insufficient capital to reach the finish line, particularly if an unexpected setback occurred.
3. Success was reliant on a series of technology breakthroughs that did not happen.

The above modes can obviously cross-feed one another.

HS: John Carmack has said something to the effect that the gap between what could be done versus what is being done is bigger in aerospace than in any other industry. Gary Hudson said that he was "amazed by how much easier the job of getting to orbit is today than even a few years go"..."Software, avionics and manufacturing technology have all improved measurably" and drastically reduced the number of people needed to design a launcher.

Now that you've gone through the rocket vehicle design phase and are well into construction, does your experience support their views or has the Falcon development perhaps been more difficult than you initially expected?

Musk: Well, hard and easy are somewhat nebulous terms. I think I have high standards and would classify getting Falcon to orbit as quite difficult. Overall though, I think we have had quite a smooth development so far, which is a credit to the hard work of the SpaceX engineering team.

The design tools, such as solid modeling and finite element analysis software are substantially more powerful than ten years ago, so that's a clear advantage. Obviously, most electronics have improved a lot too, except gyroscopes and flight termination systems.

I scanned through the Spacex website and didn't see any mention of a crew vehicle or their plans of putting 5 people into orbit by 2010. While I'm sure they are somewhat serious about this plan, and there is probably a news update or two that I missed, it definitely appears that Spacex is (sensibly) focusing much more heavily on making their rockets a commercially viable lift vehicle.

I have seen no discussion at all of a crew vehicle, so it seems logical to assume that they have not addressed that detail

The parent post is clearly a troll. PayPal isn't perfect, nobody is, but making the paypal slam AND the 'up in smoke' comment in the same sentence, that's straight up under the bridge, 'gonna eat some billy goats' type trolling.

The parent post is clearly a troll. PayPal isn't perfect, nobody is, but making the paypal slam AND the 'up in smoke' comment in the same sentence, that's straight up under the bridge, 'gonna eat some billy goats' type trolling.

I bet you feel all warm and fuzzy when you've lost (or spent poorly) hard earned money, when you see the mogul who received a chunk of it, having fun while you struggle with Windows Security, Ebay's Enigmatic Policies or PayPal's Inattention to Customers. I loved it when someone w

1. Paypal is not a bank.2. Sometimes people lie.3. I've done almost 100 transactions through paypal knowing #1 and #2, and I've been lucky enough not to get hit. If I want absolute security, I'll pay through the nose for an escrow service. If I want convenience for small purchases, I'll use PayPal.

Right, but the history of "let's do better than a standard rocket by.... because we've got $x billion" hasn't been so good.

Case in point, space shuttle.

The big thing to remember is that the Falcon boosters should be signifigantly cheaper than the current crop of launchers and at least partially reusable. So, even though it's not revolutionary, there's much jumpstarting of the launch biz with what he's got.

The problem is that most of the time, you don't need a revolution, just a little evolution.

Um, on launch the space shuttle is pretty much a big rocket. That's what the big fuel tank and boosters are for. Rocketing it into space.
The Shuttle's innovation was in the landing stage and the reuse of the rocket boosters and shuttle vehicle itself. This also allowed for large payloads such as science labs that could be carried in the vehicle and returned to Earth. In the case of Apollo or Soyuz style vehicles, only the small crew compartment is returned.

I think the point was it's not a "conventional" rocket, it's a kludgy hybrid lash-up which never worked all that well, and is fundamentally unsafe.

The Russians got it right with their shuttle - instead of a big main engine on the shuttle, have much more payload space in the orbiter, and launch the thing with a big-ass conventional rocket. Shame the Russians couldn't afford to run their shuttle.

Yeah they got it right. So right it flew only one test orbital flight and unmanned at that.Ok so that's related to economics BUT you can't really judge a launch vehicle's performance and call it "right" if it never really got a chance to do its job.

Yeah they got it right. So right it flew only one test orbital flight and unmanned at that.
Ok so that's related to economics BUT you can't really judge a launch vehicle's performance and call it "right" if it never really got a chance to do its job.

It was a proof of concept. After they built it the political leaders realized something the engineers had said all along - "hey, it really is fundementally stupid to put wings on a rocket."

You see, they had a perfectly servicable, safe, and cheap way to get p

The Russians got it right with their shuttle - instead of a big main engine on the shuttle, have much more payload space in the orbiter, and launch the thing with a big-ass conventional rocket. Shame the Russians couldn't afford to run their shuttle.

Well, no, the Russians did not get it right.

Their first -- and therefor arguably their last -- mistake was to build a shuttle system that even resembled the US Shuttle which is exactly what they did.

The american's got it right, they got it almost perfect, but congress didn't give them enough cash so they had to take out a lot of things from the shuttle design to make it as cheap as possible and as safe as possible.

Dude. What precisely did they "take out"? An anti-matter warp drive? An anti-gravity generator? That is what one could reasonably expect if the shuttle got any bigger budget. It probably will come as a shock to you but the insanely overpriced abomination that the space shuttle is, costs a co

See, the Russians are perfectly capable of making safe, well-engineered stuff. It's just that we don't always recognize it.

A F-16 has a jet intake under the cockpit. Thus, it's awfully easy for it to suck up any debris on the ground while taxing or taking off. Therefore, debris control is important. They need to scout the airport every morning. Our jets need a whole mobile maintenence facility to keep them flying.

A Mig-29? It's got a screen that deploys in front of the engines and auxiliary upward-f

What are the limitations of building such an elevator? I'm guessing the stability of making such a structure would be difficult to achieve. Any chance of a self balancing computer controlled structure?

Building a space elevator requires that you haul lots of mass into orbit. That's very expensive so it will never get built until orbital launches become cheap. But when we do have cheap access to space, you lose the whole point of building a space elevator in the first place.

The environmental impact of a space elevator is far less than that of the convential rockets. A space elevator could be powered in part by alternative energy sources that are both energy efficient and clean when compared to rocket fuel. The space elevator's effective footprint would be the size of its anchor facility (which amounts to far less space, in a very remote location).

...basically build the elevator on the ground, make it long enough (say, would 500 miles long do it? 1000? I'm thinking in terms of Pak Protector scale projects here) -- presupposing you could get that much land to lay it out, etc. could you just anchor one end, weight the other, shorten the cable and let the change in the moment of intertia fling the sucker up?

Building from the ground up would not work. It would need to be supported by compressive forces.

A space elevator would be a bundle of cables (or ribbons) built from an artificial satellite, lowered into the atmosphere, captured, and then anchored to structures on the ground. Actually to provide balance, the orbital structure needs to be in geosynchronous and as building proceeds on the tether which grows toward the ground, additional mass needs to grow outward into higher orbit to balance it. The tensi

Rockets might not 'feel' right to you, but they exist, are a known technology, and there's over 60 years of large scale design and construction experience behind them.

$1.5 billion is a lot of money when you're looking at buying groceries, but it's peanuts compared to the cost of developing a whole new technology (carbon nanotube, for example which might be needed for space elevators), then testing and building the new technology (literally) from the ground up.

In regards to the 'some new technology that nobody's invented yet' comment, I'd rather take one rocket now versus a hundred ephemeral fairy dust ideas of things that may or may not happen in the future. This isn't the only money that will ever be spent on private aerospace. If new technologies become promising and affordable to develop, then other companies will do that in the future.

These guys may succeed, they may fail. That's a great thing about America, you can take risks with commensurate payback. If every company needed the public to vote on whether to let them do their thing, we'd be where the USSR is. Oh yeah, they don't exist anymore.

Considering they seem like they want to be a viable commercial company - going with a proven technology seems like a good bet.The R&D to develop something like a space elevator is HUGE. What happens if you just can't make it work? It might sound simple enough on paper, but the engineering challenges are extreme.

> I'm surprised that with a $1.5 billion budget they couldn't find a better way to get people into space. Rockets don't seem like the "affordable" answer to me. Maybe a space elevator, or maybe some new technology that nobody's invented yet....but big rockets? They seem so dated...

Rockets are cheap.

Space elevator? Start thinking about building a space elevator when someone has built a carbon nanotube footbridge.

Something not yet invented? The probability of discovering a new physics is not directly proportional to the number of dollars spent.

So - we're back to rockets. Which are cheap.

NASA's rockets are expensive, because NASA doesn't care where the money comes from. (And NASA's funders in Congress don't care whether NASA's rockets even fly, so long as every district gets its piece of the pork pie.)

If you're Boeing or Lockmart, that's fine -- shuttling rich tourists to orbit and back will barely net you pocket change. So you build big expensive vehicles and you sell 'em to people who don't give a rat's ass about the cost of their ride, because they're using other people's money.

Thanks to Rutan, Bezos, and Musk, there's the possibility of a new market niche for those of us who prefer to use our own money.

Why care what he has to say? Well - for one Heims theory apparently is the only theory which yields remarkably exact theoretical values for the masses, the resonances, and the mean lifetimes of elementary particles, as well as the Sommerfeld fine structure constant.

Oh well, if they're "dated" then they must be bad. Sure hope your girlfriend has only gone out with you in her entire life.:-)

Seriously though, the reason rockets are expensive is because they aren't launched very much- mass production would slash the cost. But because the cost is high, production is low, and so nobody can afford to go, so the cost stays high.

If that sounds utopian, consider that the fuel to put somebody into orbit is only about as much as to send someone on a round the world trip by jet

I always thought that it is just not right esthetically speaking:
Take 500 tons of explosives, pile them up skyhigh, put a person on top of it in a tin can and then set the whole thing ablaze.
You can smell government / military-indistrial thinking all over it. There MUST be a better way.

Couldn't agree more. The reason we're still using primitive vertical launch technology is in large part due to the U.S. military's choice of silo-based ICBMs for massive nuclear barrages, from which your typical space launch vehicle was derived. Werner von Braun advocated launching rockets from long inclined ramps in order to boost payloads and reduce costs, but didn't have the clout to make this happen. For full background, check out the link. [skyramp.org]

Well there are is another reasons\ besides lack of clout.
In the US there are no convent mountains. The ideal place is as far south as possible and the rocket needs to fly over WATER to the east. IE where it can not come crashing down on a school. That is why they launch sites in Kansas. There are no sites that meet those requirements in the US. The only place that might work well for this would be in Hawaii. Any guess how the greens would scream if you tired to bulldoze that track in paradise?

The only place that might work well for this would be in Hawaii. Any guess how the greens would scream if you tired to bulldoze that track in paradise?

Check the website. There's are good arguments in favor of candidate sites, which include Vandenburg, White Sands, which both have acceptable mountain slopes, and yes, Hawaii. Carlton Meyer of skyramp.org thinks building a ramp on the barren slope of Mauna Loa may not be as big a deal with environmentalists as detractors think, and there is also the jobs is

His actual budget was a fraction of the
$1.5 billion he made on PayPal, not the whole amount.

There is no way that SpaceX would be profitable
selling rockets for $6 and $12 million each if he
spent $1.5 billion developing them.
That's part of the reason why normal space launch
rockets cost $40 to $250 million (or more...).

I think he's actually spending a pretty modest amount on development. From an older interview [spacex.com]:

While Musk said he is not the company's sole backer, he said he is prepared to fund the development of the Falcon LV entirely out of his own pocket if he has to. He declined to say exactly how much he expects to spend developing the rocket, only that the figure will be "in the tens of millions" of dollars.

hummmm. if you have an efficient design, why change it? Consider that Linus borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix in Linux's early days. Then as time progressed, the insides have changed and improved.

Same with the rockets. Right now, they are taking a standard design and imporving its reliability and economics. Down the road, when we are back on the moon, is the right time to test the space elevator.

I'm surprised that with a $1.5 billion budget they couldn't find a better way to get people into space. Rockets don't seem like the "affordable" answer to me. Maybe a space elevator, or maybe some new technology that nobody's invented yet....but big rockets? They seem so dated...

Oy! Where to start?

1. The $1.5 billion is how much Musk made from his sale of PayPal to Ebay, NOT RocketX's development budget.

2. Rockets are the best and only way to get people -- or anything else -- to space and will be f

And, if all of those that entered into early aviation, using the money they made in other industries (see, for example, Howard Hughes), thought the way you do, we'd be way behind and probably would have lost WWII.

Just because someone has money, doesn't mean they have a lot of respect from anyone except other folks with money. Musk is young enough, he probably wants to do something _memorable_ with his life.

I'd also be curious to know if his interest in space predated his dotcom activities. One early microcomputer pioneer is reputed to have motivated his employees with claims that if his company was successful, they'd intest in space development. He even invested in a couple of rocket companies-and then retreated

I agree, but I'm glad someone's doing it, even if I wouldn't. This is why I have some respect for what Gates is doing with his money. He's helping people get educated and manage to stay alive to actually experience space travel in the future;-)

An individual RD-180 costs $10 million. The price-per launch that Musk is charging for the entire Falcon I is $6 million. Putting a $10 million engine on a rocket that you're charging $6 million for doesn't seem particularly economical.

Renting Baikonur and hiring Russian specialists would have cost him half as much and the results would be much better, IMHO.

Well actually I was looking into this today. Are you aware of any electro-magnetic propulsion system that has been shown to be capable of even putting 1kg into orbit? It's one thing to get a bunch of engineers together and make a rocket engine using technology that is 40 years old, it's another to sit down and design something that has never been done before. Personally I see think about the whole hitting-the-air-at-mach-8-at-sea-level and that's about the end of that plan. What's your idea?